John McGahern’s new novel has been over ten
years in gestation, his first since 1990’s Amongst
Women. Apparently, the manuscript was at one
stage 1500 pages long, and was cut back and refined.
In a sense, when a major writer has spent so long
on a work, any 600 or even 1000 word review, soon
after publication, after one reading, can only be
bathetic. How can one do justice to the subtleties
involved, or even give a hint of the richness and
fullness contained within these covers?
Perhaps the first thing to say is that very little
happens; and yet, everything happens. There is little
conventional plot or character development, but stories
get told, characters are delineated. The rhythm of
the prose takes its beat from the natural world, the
changing seasons around a lake in an unspecified border
county, sometime in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s.
There are recurring references to the heron on the
lake, the alder tree outside the front door, and episodes
of saving the hay, lambing and bringing cattle to
market. But if this is an essay in that almost forgotten
genre, the pastoral, it is also an elegy for an entire
way of life, a way of being and behaving, a mode of
social structure and organisation.

Everything revolves around Kate and
Joe Ruttledge, a local man who has returned from London
with his wife, having bought a small farm, supplementing
his income with some freelance advertising copywriting
as well. There is a sense in which Ruttledge is the
McGahern/writer figure. Then there are their close friends
and neighbours, Jamesie and Mary, the former a gossipy
and gabby fund of anecdote and local lore, always on
the lookout for news. The affection which grows between
these four is gentle yet palpable. Many other characters
make appearances every so often: The Shah, Ruttledge’s
rich, single, teetotal, entrepreneurial uncle, who comes
to the Ruttledges for dinner every Sunday; Frank Dolan,
the employee with whom he has a strange, uncommunicative
relationship, who eventually takes over the business
when the Shah retires, despite committing the faux
pas of being ‘the man who swore to do less’
at a interview for a bank loan; Monica, the Shah’s
widowed sister; the loquacious, libidinous but ultimately
viciously misogynist John Quinn, whose ‘singsonging
cajolery’ is a front for actions that are entirely
self-serving; Johnny, Jamesie’s brother who emigrated
to London many years before - not because he had to,
like the rest of the country, but to follow a hopeless
love – and wound up a rootless bachelor, working
at Ford’s in Dagenham; Jimmy Joe McKiernan, the
auctioneer, undertaker, and IRA ringleader; Patrick
Ryan, an asexual jack-of-all trades, quick to take offence,
slow to finish a job; the brutalised Bill Evans, a victim
of the harsh, now extinct system of hiring out orphans
as cheap farm labour to wealthy landowners, or putting
them to serve at tables in seminaries, after they’d
had a spell with ‘the Brothers’; Fr Conroy,
the decent parish priest who fixes him up with sheltered
accommodation; and Jamesie and Mary’s clever civil
servant son, Jim, and his self-important wife Lucy,
and their children.
The thing is, by most normal criteria, all this just
shouldn’t work. For people of my generation, particularly
those raised in cities, there can arise what has come
to be known as ‘a credibility gap’ with
McGahern, perhaps not so much with the near existential
The Pornographer, but certainly with the family
history of Amongst Women. Do, or did (the difference
is crucial), people really behave like that? In the
latter novel, the patriarchal old republican Moran may
be a monster, but one is left wondering what would have
happened if one of his children had simply tweaked him
on the nose, or told him to stop being such an awful
auld bollacks. Hey presto, the story would have fallen
apart, or got more interesting. But that isn’t
McGahern’s way, and maybe it is not the way of
the people he writes about either. With That They
May Face The Rising Sun, just when you think it’s
getting a bit too twee and folksy and country cute,
and even bordering on boring, along comes another understated
gem in the interaction between characters, or a word
or phrase or paragraph of great power, or a description
to die for. The impeccable gift he has of orchestrating
conversation between people is perhaps his greatest
compositional resource. For, what’s finally important
in fiction, far more important that ideas or wit or
style or knowledge or theories, and just as important
as vision, are moments of emotional truth. They are
the reason why we read. We are wary of them, of course,
and shy away from them, because they can so easily come
out as kitsch or cliché. Who wants second-hand
emotions? Far worse than worn out thoughts. But McGahern
pulls it off, every time, without a false note or jarring
moment. This is especially noticeable in scenes like
the laying out of Johnny, who dies suddenly while home
on holiday from England; or in the digging of his grave,
which gives the book its title. The pagan is older than
the Christian, and he must be buried with his head to
the west, so that he may face the rising sun in the
east. ‘We look to the resurrection of the dead.’
There are even intimations of the coming of modernity,
with the telegraph polls spoiling the view, so that
every house can have a telephone. The description of
Jamesie and Mary watching Blind Date on TV
is frankly amusing, showing that some of these old hicks
from the sticks might be more tuned in than you’d
give them credit for. The last sentence, in a work of
exceptional prose, read: ‘At the porch, before
entering the house, they both (Joe and Kate) turned
to look back across the lake, even though they knew
that both Jamesie and Mary had long since disappeared
from the sky.’ I owe it to my own parents, and
others of their dead and dying generation, to praise
this book.
Masterpieces do not come along every year, or even every
decade. But it is not besmirching through exaggeration
that overused and so degraded term to apply it here.
I bow, awestruck, before such an achievement.